Aru raised an eyebrow. “Flushed and glowing from running back to you guys?”
“I was going to say ‘dull.’”
“Thanks.”
“How did you get back to us?” asked Brynne.
As Aru was steered to the dining table, she nodded toward Kara. Aiden had carried the unconscious girl up the stairs and laid her on the couch. “She’s still out?”
“Your mom put an enchantment around the museum that makes any stranger temporarily fall asleep once they get too close,” said Aiden. “Anyone with Otherworldly blood, that is.”
“Pretty sneaky,” said Brynne admiringly. “Kinda like you, Shah.”
“Where is Mom?” asked Aru. “Is she out for groceries or something?”
Brynne and Mini exchanged a look.
“We’ve got a lot to talk about, Shah,” said Brynne.
“If it’s bad, tell me now,” said Aru.
“It’s not bad…” said Mini. “Just strange.”
Aru wasn’t sure what that meant, so she waited.
“First, why don’t you eat and catch us up,” said Brynne. “Starting with why did you bring the Sleeper’s daughter here?”
Between bites of cake and gulps of milk, Aru repeated what Kara had told her—how Kara had been raised in the Sleeper’s home for the past two years and her memories had been wiped, about the strange, glowing ward on the back of her neck and how the Sleeper called Kara his “secret weapon” even though she wasn’t a Pandava. Aru even told them about Sunny the trident, now secure on Kara’s finger as a shiny ring.
“I don’t get it, though,” said Aru. “She’s my age, but I didn’t see her in the Pool of the Past or in the Sleeper’s memories. I don’t know how that’s possible—unless he was secretly a jerk of a husband to my mom….”
“Or…there could be another explanation,” said Brynne, eyeing Kara. “It’s rarely done, but sometimes rich Otherworld families can pay a timekeeper to take a baby and put it in stasis until the parents are ready to raise it. That happened with one of my aunts. She died in an accident right after my cousin was born. Her sister agreed to adopt him later, but she was super young—like eleven or something. So they magically froze the kid’s development until my aunt’s sister was old enough to take care of a baby. Which makes my cousin, who just had his fifteenth birthday, technically thirty. He tried to use that as an excuse when he threw a party and broke into my uncle’s ‘bad day’ cabinet, but it didn’t go so well.”
“Timekeeper?” asked Mini, her eyes wide. “Wait. They can change time?”
“No,” said Brynne. “That’s impossible. But they can hold on to pockets of it. It’s a whole other level of magic.”
Aru frowned. So Kara could be her older half sister, from before the Sleeper knew Aru’s mom, but that still left a lot of questions unanswered. What had happened to Kara’s mother? Did Aru’s mom know about this? Had Krithika and Suyodhana planned to bring Kara into their family one day?
Mini still looked concerned. “Are there any health ramifications to freezing a baby’s development? Does it affect their DNA? What about—”
“Point is,” Brynne said over her, “it’s possible, but it still doesn’t explain why you brought her along.”
“Kara said she knows how to stop the Sleeper,” said Aru, shoving a macaron into her mouth. “And also…you’re not gonna believe this, but…apparently his army is marching on Lanka right now. They’re planning to attack within a week.”
Aru stared at her sisters, expecting them to look shocked. Instead, they looked resigned.
“We know,” said Mini. “It’s all over the Otherworld news. But Kubera, the ruler of Lanka and Lord of Wealth, says—”
Brynne held a finger to her lips, pointing at Kara, and dropped her voice to a whisper. “We’ll get to that, but should we even be talking about this stuff with her around? I mean, how do you know we can trust her, Shah? All that stuff about stopping the Sleeper…Do you seriously believe her?”
Aru pictured Kara nervously fiddling with her ring and thought about that aura of loneliness that clung to her.
“Yeah, I do, actually,” said Aru. “She’s just found out that the person who promised to take care of her turned out to be lying. She’s hurt. She just she wants to do what’s right and doesn’t know what that looks like. I can’t fault her for that.”
Aru’s jaw clenched. She understood how Kara felt, even though her own feelings were complicated when it came to her father. She hadn’t even had a chance to tell her sisters what she’d seen and learned about him from the goddess Aranyani.
Aru had known that the Sleeper had gone looking for the Tree of Wishes, but she hadn’t understood that it was because he wanted to change his terrible destiny to bring destruction upon the world. All he’d hoped for was a quiet family life. But, in the end, trying to change his fate ended up sealing it.
Aru stared around the apartment. It was so clean and so quiet that it was honestly distracting. Where was her mom? And what happened to Sheela, Nikita, and Rudy? They’d all been together back in March, and Aru had half expected Rudy to storm in with a garishly colored outfit by now.
“Where is everyone?”
“Everyone is fine…. At least, we think so,” said Mini.
“We know Sheela and Nikita are okay,” said Brynne. “They’re still annoyingly bad about crossing boundaries while we sleep, sometimes yanking us into the astral plane—which is the worst—but Mini and I have been able to train them in our shared dreams, so that’s been kinda cool.”
“Nikita recently informed me that my clothes are, and I quote, ‘an abysmal representation of my dread powers and hopelessly one-note,’” Mini said, plucking at her black-and-purple tie-dyed sweatshirt. “She’s going to send me a whole new wardrobe. She’s calling it a ‘deathly do-over.’”
Aru laughed, but her smile faded when she saw the grave look on Brynne’s face.
“Aru…something happened the moment you went against the Sleeper,” said Brynne. “It looked like you hugged him, and then there was this huge burst of light. After that, you guys were straight-up gone. His armies vanished, too.”
“We looked for you for hours,” added Mini. “We would’ve gone back to the garden, but—”
“But emergency alarms started blaring all over the place. We tried to call you through the Pandava mind link, but there was nothing but static,” said Brynne. “We didn’t know what else to do, so we went back to the Night Bazaar.”
Aiden, who had been silently observing up to now, reached for Shadowfax. “It might be easier to show you what happened next.”
“At first it was great!” said Mini. “Boo had tracked down the twins’ parents, and he used his Council status to speed up their immigration paperwork. He brought them to the Night Bazaar so they could be reunited! Apparently, the twins’ parents had been looking for them for years, but children under thirteen have all these protective spells surrounding them.”